Entries in TWIS
(8)

This Thursday, Dec 20 2012, Dr. Kiki will have 21 hours of Google+ Hangouts on Air to mock the pending non-end of the world. The TWIS minions know that World Robot Domination won't be happening yet. Soon, but not yet.

I've updated the TWIS app's data to have the TWIS 2010 Science Music Compilation now that the album is available. Everything was going great, many of the contributing artists had iTunes pages and versions of the songs already in iTunes. Unfortunately when I went to test the app with the new data I discovered that the <store> tag in the TWISMusic.xml file was not being parsed at all so I can't link to the album link on twis.org so that app users can purchase the app. How embarrassing!

My success at releasing bug free versions of the TWIS app has been completely non-existant. My first released update exposed a bug where the absolute paths (full path names) to art assets such as the book cover art and album cover art would break when the app gets updated to a newer version. My bugfix update to correct that created a new bug that would crash the app when would execute log statements that had been left in the release version of the app. This has been a bad trend of not finding these bugs until after I update the released version onto my own iPad from the App Store. The bugfix release to remove the log statements was no exception. This time when I updated my local copy of the app from the App Store I discovered that it was using the unfinished iPad UI instead of the iPhone UI it should have been using. Oops. Unfortunately this mistake will render the TWIS app unusable on the iPad until the next update get's pushed out. Instead of simply repackaging the TWIS app with the intended UI on the iPad I'm going to use this blunder to light a fire under my development efforts to get a semi-functional iPad optimized UI.

Hopefully after the release of Xcode 4.2 and iOS 5 my release cycle will have a more stringent testing procedure! For those that don't know the released Xcode 4.1 can't run debug versions of an app on iOS 5 and Xcode 4.2 can't bundle iOS 4.3 release versions.